Localização de recursos em redes de emergência tolerantes a atrasos e desconexões

Abstract

In emergency scenarios such as natural disasters, communication networks can be used to assist in the communication and coordination efforts to minimize losses from the disaster. A problem in these situations is that the network infrastructure may have been destroyed by the disaster or not be available to first responders. A solution to this problem are mobile ad hoc networks formed by devices brought by these teams. These networks are called emergency networks and can be very dynamic as to its connectivity, have great mobility and have a large coverage area. In a network formed spontaneously, one important feature is resource location, both computational and physical resources related to a emergency situation. For a network as the ones considered in this work this functionality should be delay and disconnection tolerant. This work proposes a solution to resource location, using delay-disruption tolerant network architecture(DTN). A study is made on different message dissemination mechanisms, aiming to reduce network resource usage. The proposed solution is validated through simulation and a prototype implementation. The results show that it is possible to save network resources, while maintaining a high discovery rate, using different algorithms aside from the Epidemic algorithm, finding more resources than a search only on the network connected nodes.